The smartest former NFL player we know watches Monday Night Football and wonders if the ladies couldn't help us demystify the whole damn thing. Also: Sandusky.

On a typical Monday night, I gather my mood stabilizers and my male friends and we sit around a high-definition TV summoning thoughts of supremacy and valor and toughness and the sort of collateral grunts that I can present to my woman when I'm feeling unmanly, and she will sigh and concede to my silly plays at masculinity, and she will kiss me. And I will believe that it's all connected, that my manhood is pigskinny and she can taste the glory on my lips and she will forgive my immaturity because I am pulled from the insides by football dreams, which are not at all silly — which are real. I played in the NFL, damnit!

So last night I left my male friends at home and watched the unbeatable Packers win with a few female friends of mine. Beautiful, thoughtful, well-informed female football fans, exactly the kind the NFL has targeted in a marketing attack that seeks to find inroads with the 79 million female fans the NFL says it already has. And this is good business. Women bring a new dimension to the game. They are playing fantasy football, they are hosting NFL television shows, and they are doing sideline reporting. This is progress. But it's still just window-dressing.

Women may be paraded around the periphery of a sport played by men and courted for their money by an opportunistic marketing arm, but the effort is more illusory than progressive. There is a palpable reluctance to allow women into the operational world of football because the operational world of football aggressively overplays the manly, and it requires near-total male isolation to pull it off. Emotion? What's that? Pain? Ha! Doubt? C'mon, man! Reassurance? Well, goddamn, what kind of a little girl are you?

The reason women are absent from the NFL is because to acknowledge that you even need women inside the NFL is to admit that you are a pussy — and we can't have any pussies around here, fellas. When I played, I could go a whole week without talking to a woman I wasn't sleeping with, shuffling in and out of the facility in my sweats and tennis shoes, kept in a yes-sir, no-sir state of perpetual adolescence wherein high-school views of a woman's worth were the norm and any thoughtful discussion about a woman or with a woman was literally non-existent. When I finally did talk with a woman, it was at the end of the week and I had a drink in my hand. Either that or it was in the locker room and I had a towel around my waist, female reporters seeing us naked probably doing little to bridge the gap either.

Many former and current players have quite a tough time dealing with the opposite sex, because they never really had to. They never learned how. And in fact, the more fully one devotes himself to football, the greater tendency he has to turn his back on the things that make him human. And the turning is what we are told makes us successful football players: total devotion. Marriages are falling apart, but they can wait. Bad relationships with family members. They can wait. Sickness, fatigue, mental instabilities: these are products of a weak mind and can be defeated by the correct priorities. Football is it, absolutely.

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I wondered, on Monday night, while the Packers were destroying the Vikings, what would have happened if it was a woman who witnessed that crime in progress at Penn State. Would it have taken ten years to come to light? What if it was a female athletic director? Would she have put a lid on things, too? And while we're at it, would the outrage we're witnessing now be quite so passionate if they were little girls being raped at a dance school instead of little boys in a football locker room?

It is too late and too sad for hypotheticals in the Jerry Sandusky case, but what you need to know is that there is always a choice — humanity or football, football or humanity — and they all choose football, every time.

It is the dark side to our obsession with the game. The outrage over Sandusky is complicated by our collective belief that the house of football is sacred, and that he has defiled not only the children he abused but the whole house, which we all continue to believe in. It is a beautiful game, after all. But without any women around to keep it honest, big-money football remains an ugly club — and it's hard to believe in something quite this ugly.

--Nate Jackson played six seasons with the Denver Broncos. He has written for Deadspin, Slate, The Denver Post, and The New York Times — and is currently working on a book about life in the NFL.

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